Roman Polanski's 'victim' is mother who wants charges dropped

The woman alleged to have been raped by Roman Polanski when she was 13 is now a married mother-of-three who has repeatedly asked authorities to drop charges against the director.

Mrs Geimer has requested that the outstanding charges against Polanski be withdrawnPhoto: AP

8:00PM BST 27 Sep 2009

Polanski, 76, has already admitted that he had sexual intercourse with Samantha Geimer, now 45, in the Hollywood Hills home of Jack Nicholson in March 1977, where he was photographing the young girl for a fashion magazine.

After plying the youngster with champagne and drugs and taking nude pictures of her in a hot tub, Polanski had sexual intercourse with the teen despite her resistance and requests to be taken home.

Polanski was detained in Switzerland on Saturday as he arrived to attend the Zurich film festival, and could be extradited following a US request for his detention.

"We did photos with me drinking champagne," Mrs Geimer testified to a grand jury. "Toward the end it got a little scary, and I realised he had other intentions and I knew I was not where I should be.

In a 2003 interview, Mrs Geimer said she had tried to resist Polanski's advances as he led her to a bedroom.

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"I said, like, 'No, no. I don't want to go in there. No, I don't want to do this. No,' and then I didn't know what else to do," she said.

"We were alone, and I didn't know what else would happen if I made a scene. So I was just scared, and after giving some resistance, I figured well, I guess I'll get to come home after this."

Polanski was later charged with rape and five other felonies before later pleading guilty to a lesser charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, partly to spare Mrs Geimer the trauma of having to go through a trial.

Mrs Geimer has said in a past interview she was unhappy at having to recount her experiences to police and before a grand jury.

"I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to talk to anyone or tell anyone. I just felt forced to continually tell this story," she said.

"I was so angry about it. It was like - wasn't what happened bad enough, now we got to go through every single day of my life."

Mrs Geimer left Los Angeles in the 1980s for Hawaii, where she has rebuilt her life with her husband, with whom she has three sons.

However, the enduring legal questions surrounding Polanski's flight from justice have ensured that Mrs Geimer is regularly dragged reluctantly back into the public eye despite her appeals for the case to be dropped.

"I got over it a long time ago," she has said.

"I wasn't prepared to carry a lot of bad feelings with me and further damage my life and continue the trauma of it."

In January, Mrs Geimer filed a legal declaration in Los Angeles formally requesting that the outstanding charges against Polanski be withdrawn.

She said Los Angeles prosecutors' insistence that Polanski must return to the United States before dismissal of the case could be considered as a "cruel joke being played on me".

She also voiced anger that authorities had detailed her grand jury testimony in related hearings to the case.

"True as they may be, the continued publication of those details causes harm to me, my beloved husband, my three children and my mother," she said, adding that it was time for closure.

"I have survived, indeed prevailed, against whatever harm Mr Polanski may have caused me as a child," she said. Polanski had taken flight, she said, "because the judicial system did not work."